The Dire ward spot to the left of the Ancients no longer gives vision over the rune area infront of Roshan

This spot.

Slightly adjusted the dire secondary jungle bounty rune further back

Reduced spawnbox size for both Dire hard camps

Shifted down the spawnbox for the ancient camp (formerly medium camp) in the Dire secondary jungle (so a high ground ward does not block the camp)

Fixed a rare case where Dire ancients could be stuck between trees when spawning

The Big Changes You Need to Know About 7.02

You can find the full list of Hero and Item changes on the Steam website. (It’s a huge list, so I’m not going to copy-paste it here.)

Can’t Heal Yourself If You Hurt Yourself

Queen of Pain’s self-inflicted blademail abuse now comes to an end: Blademail damage return no longer spell lifesteals off of returned damage. This mean’s QOP’s 70% lifesteal passive doesn’t heal on damage from Blademail anymore. If you were one of the few people going Blademail QOP before this, congratulations on your free MMR.

Sentries are Split Like Observers

Sentry Wards now come in packs of 1 for 100 gold – an easier time for supports, and a tougher laning phase for an already nerfed suite of invis heroes. With the addition of shrines and the buff to early game passive gold supports, it’s going to be even tougher now to roam as Bounty Hunter or Riki. Your enemy mid player can just buy a sentry along with a wraith band and pooled tangoes.

Ember, You’re too Strong Right Now

For Ember Spirit, root now disables Activate Fire Remnant. Which means two things: Ember is immediately weaker to just about everything in the game (because everything Roots – we HoN now), and the Veil of Discord magic damage build is slightly weaker. A significant nerf, but it makes sense given that Root is supposed to completely immobilize a hero.

IceFrog: “You’re Pulling My Leg, Right?”

Doing weird shit like pulling creeps with Pudge hook, pulling the large camp with Tiny’s toss and Rubick’s Telekinesis is gone. Not many people did it, but it’s nice to know that there’s some consistency. IceFrog has always been against messing with the creep equilibrium in ways that enemies can’t recover from.

Dire Side Map Changes

There are a slew of changes to the Dire side map to try and balance the winrate, which had a huge Radiant advantage since 7.00. The trees around the Dire Tier 2 towers are now slightly different. More foliage has been added to the forests surrounding the Tier 2s to make it easier to TP into fog. The ancient and large camp in the secondary jungle has been switched, and the spawn boxes for the new ancient camp (old large camp) has been reduced to make it easy to stack.

Dire Side Tier 2 TopDire Side Tier 2 Bot

No More Sniper Bear?

Lonely Druid, like Ember, who got changed so irrevocably that he’s played an entirely different way, has been nerfed slightly. But the nerfs are not that bad – the main Lone Druid hero still has the same talents with reduced numbers, indicating that IceFrog wants to keep the choice to play the hero in two different ways. The new +12 armor to the bear talent might revitalize the old build. Let’s see how it plays out.

Monkey… Pleb?

Monkey King is now officially trash tier, with a 5% lower winrate in just a day of playing. -3 base armor coupled with a change to talent tree and a huge damage nerf to Jingu Mastery means the hero’s laning phase is a lot more difficult now. Atleast Wukong’s Command doesn’t continue through aegis now OSFrog

Fog of War Simulator 2017

Observer wards have a Fog of War simulator that will show you exactly what vision you’ll get. I know people will be crying “muh skill cap”, but like Purge said in his 7.02 first impressions, it’s better to have players learn the game through playing it than to look up a guide or YouTube videos. Now you’ll learn good ward placements through playing and don’t have to watch Sonneiko’s replays.

Heroes Nerfed a Lot:

Monkey King

Dark Seer

Queen of Pain

Lone Druid

Heroes Buffed a Lot:

Anti Mage

Bane

Windranger

Phoenix

Nyx Assasin

Summary of Dota 2 7.02

Most other heroes have gotten some small changes to their talents. It’s still kind of disappointing to see the power creep of certain heroes like Pudge and Meepo not being addressed, but it’s a start. This patch changes a lot about the game and will stabilise the insane metagame created with 7.00.

If you’re interested in the changes of the past, you can look at our articles about 7.00 and 7.01 to get briefed on Dota 2 history.